New Approach Could Sink Floating Point Computation

In this case, something better is posits, his third iteration of his “universal numbers” research. Posits, he says, will solve the most pressing problems of IEEE 754, while delivering better performance and accuracy, and doing it with fewer bits. Better yet, he claims the new format is a “drop-in replacement” for standard floats, with no changes needed to an application’s source code.
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Gustafson told us that a 32-bit posit can replace a 64-bit float in almost all cases, which would have profound implications for scientific computing.

This would have quite an impact on the software that I worked with for many years. I’d be interested to hear what Raj Vedam has to say about this.